The advantage off agriculture is not quite so clear. Early farming was barely more efficient, one farmer barely producing more than they themselves consumed. And the decrease in diversity of foodstuffs made them each individually less nourished compared to the variety of berries and nuts the foragers would eat. Hunter gatherer societies actually had lots of free time. Finding food wasn't a constant struggle. What farming societies had is organization of force and a concept of land ownership.
>Hunter gatherer societies actually had lots of free time. Finding food wasn't a constant struggle.
If hunter gathers had so much free time, they must have had a lot of sex. And yet despite this, their populations never reached that of agrarian societies. This means that either they didn't live such abundant lives or they did for certain period and either starved or killed each other when their environment reached carrying capacity.
>What farming societies had is organization of force and a concept of land ownership
What farming society had was organization and numbers. It's odd to claim that people who grew up with a hoe or parchment end up more violent than those that grew up with a bow. Until the invention of firearms, hunter gatherers tended to be the better fighters. The way that kings and emperors defeated them was my pitting them against each other, but if they managed to unite, they were unstoppable, like Atila the Hun or Genghis Khan.
The huns and mongols were pastoralists, not hunter gatherers. A hunter gatherer society can’t maintain a large enough population in a given geographic area to compete with agrarian or pastoralist cultures, in terrain suitable to those lifestyles.
Also above a fairly low threshold how many children a woman has isn’t proportional to how much sex she has. One man can have sufficient sex with several dozen women to keep them at a maximal rate of child production.
Many, many animals do also. Tigers inform each other of their whereabouts through complex scent markings that contain pheromones, and they violently defend their territory. The American black bear does so similarly. Male mice are territorial and do not tolerate unfamiliar males within their home range. Many lizards are territorial. Fish territories are generally ruled by a single individual or breeding pairs. Active root segregation and the defence of space by plants indicates that plants are probably also territorial. So "the concept" of land ownership is not remotely a uniquely human trait.
Even many agricultural societies still had seasonal nomadic tendencies during which they hunted and gathered. Many sedentary societies lived and worked communally without much social stratification. The reason we associate agriculture with centralization is that centralized agricultural societies conquered the others, not that centralization is inherent to agriculture.
To elaborate on this point: without agriculture centralization wasn't advantageous (or possible) but with agriculture centralization is advantageous--so centralized societies outcompete and are "selected for" over non-centralized societies and we end up with a "genotype" of societies having the trait of centralization.
If anything, farming made societies more susceptible to famine. Specialization of labor and dependence on a specific plot of land made it much harder to simply move somewhere else when food was scarce. Hunter-gatherers and herders were almost always nomadic and moved to wherever food was available.
